This paper gives a short intellectual history of perceived abuses of scientific publishing focusing on forms of behaviour that target measures of productivity. While the paper takes a long view stretching back to the early nineteenth century, it focuses on the early days of citation analysis. In the late 1960s, three linked circumstances combined to legitimate and fund ongoing research into measures of scientific achievement. First, renewed pressures on funding bodies in the USA forced managers to seek new modes of accounting for the benefits of funded research. At the same time, efforts were launched to describe (and defend), sociologically, the nature of what had become known as ‘the scientific community.’ Finally, and closely linked to these, citation data became available on a much larger scale than it previously had been. These elements merged in a conference at Stanford University in 1974 that brought together a range of academics, information scientists, and government officials to debate how best to create indicators of national scientific output.

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